Solved I have not been able to Backup or Restore my C: Drive, nothing happens

[Mike Lynch]

I have not been able to Backup or Restore my C: Drive, nothing happens.


I have sought help but am fearful to initiate the suggestions just yet.


I thought perhaps a 3rd Party may have a way to safeguard my data before initiating the suggestions.


I installed the Free Version of Macrium 7.


I compared what it would Backup vs. Disk Management and found what appears to be a difference.


Perhaps the difference is why I cannot Backup or Restore.


I am attaching Images of both the Disk Management and Macrium map of my C: Drive.


What could the Fat32 Partition be and could it be the root of my difficulty?

 

[SIW2]

You haven't told us if there are any error messages.

Try using the proprietary snaphot driver

 

[SIW2]

Not enough space on the 100mb partition for vss diff area. You can use the proprietary snap driver as pictured in my previous post, or make some space on the 100mb, or use a 3rd party partition manager to increase the size of the 100mb partition.

Aomei Backupper


Aomei partition assistant

I don't think macrium has a proprietary driver and therefore has to rely on vss.

 

[RolandJS]

SIW2, OP could make a full image of the C partition, which I assume contains both the OS and data stuff, and for now, simply ignore System Reserved partition? Whether AOMEI or Macrium Reflect is used, doesn't matter.

 

[Snick]

What seems odd is the 100MB system recovery partition is too full. I would format the unformatted to Fat32,merge with system, make image.
I removed system reserved partition on my drive
Fix for Low System Reserved Partition on MBR/GPT Disk in ...

Bill

 

[Bree]

What seems odd is the 100MB system recovery partition is too full...

The 100MB partition shown in the Disk Management screenshot of post #1 is the EFI System Partition, not the recovery partition. Mess with the EFI partition and you won't be able to boot this UEFI system.


The 128MB unformatted partition shown in the Macrium screenshot but not in Disk Management is the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR). The default MSR size in W7 is 128MB, for W10 this has been reduced to just 16MB. This partition is always present on GPT formatted disks, but never shown in Disk Management. I'd leave that alone too.

GPT formatted disks and the UEFI partition specification do not allow hidden sectors.[3] Microsoft reserves a chunk of disk space using this MSR partition type, to provide an alternative data storage space for such software components which previously may have used hidden sectors on MBR formatted disks.

Microsoft Reserved Partition - Wikipedia


Macrium will include both of these partitions in the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows. I have used Macrium to image and restore my UEFI systems and these two partitions do not prevent that from working.

 

[Bree]

What could the Fat32 Partition be...

The EFI System Partition, essential for booting your UEFI machine. See my post above...

...and could it be the root of my difficulty?

No. See my last paragraph in the post above.


There is some other reason Macrium cannot make a backup. Please share any Macrium error messages. A full log of your (failed or otherwise) backups can be found in the Log tab in Macrium. What error does Macrium report here?

 

[Snick]

Not enough space on the 100mb partition for vss diff area. You can use the proprietary snap driver as pictured in my previous post, or make some space on the 100mb, or use a 3rd party partition manager to increase the size of the 100mb partition.

Aomei Backupper


Aomei partition assistant

I don't think macrium has a proprietary driver and therefore has to rely on vss.

Mike Lynch
Have you tried AOMEI?
Same problem?
Second opinion?

 

[Mike Lynch]

Here is what the VSS Log has:

 

[Mike Lynch]

Just a side note / observation.
I manually attempted to update my System this morning.
I went to Windows Update.
Searched for and found an Update.
Tried to apply it.
Windows said I couldn't as another Update was in progress which Task Manager did not show as happening.
I decided to reboot my System and noticed that there were no Updates waiting to be applied requiring a reboot.
I rebooted and Windows started to install an Update and took about four minutes to apply it.
The message about not powering down was on the screen.
After it finished, the system restarted and booted.
I went back to Windows Update and 'surprise', the update I was originally presented with was installed?
Who knows what or why this happened but I Snipped all I could just in case it might shed light on my Backup problem.

 

[Mike Lynch]

Just a 'second' side note / observation.

The situation with Windows Update occurred again today, same symptoms and messages.
I search for a solution and cane across the following which I used and it appeared to fix the situation.
Note that I have not Rebooted so I do not know if the fix will hold.

cmd, run as admin, net stop wuauserv
cmd, run as admin, net start wuauserv

I will now reboot but will have to wait until another Windows Update is available.

 

[Bree]

Here is what the VSS Log has:

The VSS log says: Backup Aborted! Incremental Backups not supported in the Free Edition.

Incremental backups are a Premium feature. An Incremental will be small because it only contains changes since the last backup. You make a Full, then each time you have changes you want to record you can make an incremental. Each incremental has only the changes since the last incremental, so you need the Full and all subsequent Incrementals to restore the latest image.

You attempted an incremental backup with your Free edition and that's why it failed. You can make Full backups and Differential backups with Free. Each differential has all the changes since the last Full backup, so they tend to be larger than Incrementals, but still smaller than a Full image. To restore the latest image you just need the Full and the latest Differential.

Try again, this time make a Differential image and it should work.

 

[Mike Lynch]

Will do!

 

[Mike Lynch]

It appears that in my eagerness to supply information, I have confused a successful resolution to my dilemma.

MY APOLOGIES TO EVERYONE WHO HAS CONTRIBUTED!

I will start a new thread and fight the urge to second guess by trying 'other stuff' while a resolution is being developed.

Again, I am sorry for the confusion I have caused.

I decided to try and upgrade in place to Windows 8.1.
It took me several Posts and Searches but I found the Retail Version and ordered it.
Prior to that, I purchased an External Drive and ran:

Easy File Transfer to it,
WD Backup to it.
Macrium Reflect to it.

Having nothing more to do, I ran a manual Windows Update and updated with what was offered.
Unlike prior Updates since first reporting this problem thread, Windows Update did not try and run a Creating Restore Point, first, which always fail.
SUPRISE!
Since it did not try and create a Restore Point, I checked to see if the Update was installed, it was.
I then decided to try and create a Restore Point, it worked.
The Restore Point worked and I did not do anything that I am aware of to cause it to work.
Thank you Jesus!